1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to systems for systems for accessing product information and, more particularly, to systems for accessing current insurance product information from a variety of distributed non-uniform data sources.
2. Relevant Background
The insurance industry markets insurance products based upon the product coverage and health care providers that participate in the particular product. Each insurance carrier offers a variety of products and each product typically has a unique set of participating providers. Especially in the case of small insurance plans (e.g., fewer than 100 participants) the plans are marketed through brokers. Brokers may represent several insurance carriers and within each carrier a variety of insurance plans. In most instances the broker does not have specific knowledge on hand about the many plans offered and will rarely have up-to-date knowledge of the participating health care providers for each product.
Purchasers often specify certain criteria that are desired in an insurance product. For example, purchasers often want to know that a set of preferred health care providers participate in the plan they are purchasing. Because brokers do not have this specific knowledge at hand, they must delay the purchase transaction to research each potential plan with each potential carrier to find whether each purchaser specified criteria is met. This is typically done manually by searching through printed materials provided by the carriers. More recently, carriers provide up-to-date information on databases accessible through public networks such as the Internet.
Unfortunately, even public databases require that the broker know the idiosyncrasies of each data source (e.g., access protocol, security protocol, and searchable fields). Further, each broker must know the unique format in which the requested data is returned in order to make sense of the search results. Even when complete results are obtained, the results must be manually reformatted and aggregated into an understandable format. This manual process is time consuming and can result in inaccuracy as well as incomplete information. A need exists for an automated method for aggregating data from a plurality of disparate data sources.